Even This I Get to Experience

by Norman Lear

  • • •

  I WAS NO MORE THAN a B student at Weaver High, but with an A profile. The A profile part is something I have come to recognize only quite recently in the preparation for these pages; it was not the way I saw myself then. The paragraph adjacent to my photograph in the 1940 yearbook, The Weaver High School Portal, read: “This is Lear, the inimitable Lear—clearing house for ancient, medieval, or risqué jokes, past master of the art of reflex-provoking (sneezing, etc.) and if anyone asks him who Winchell is—he’s New York’s Lear. An ultra-sophisticate, the ‘King’ tells a good story, showers before breakfast, writes poetry, likes debating, acting, orating, and is a famous wit (infamous if you must!). We can’t seem to do the old boy justice.”

  I’m addressed as “King” above because, as I said, I wrote the humor column in the weekly Lookout, “Notes to You from King Lear.” Interesting that I borrowed that appellation then; over the years it was the only time I ever did. I was “Class Prophet,” so I also wrote the class play. I did all that writing on a tall, old Remington typewriter. The only space at home that worked to seal off sound was our basement, which my father never got around to turning into a playroom, so the cellar became my study. It was cold and dank, especially at five A.M. before school. Last-minute clutch writer that I was even then, I was there often at that hour, with the sound of my typing occasionally masked by the sound of coal coming down the chute into the five-ton coal bin within twenty feet of my workstation. (This might explain “showers before breakfast” in my Portal profile.)

  I like the guy in that profile and see now why the writer said he “can’t seem to do the old boy justice.” Oh, how I wish I’d had that Norman Lear in focus back then. I’d have a different story to tell about myself and Ruthie Glazier, and Hope Sheintop, and maybe a few others at Weaver High.

  One spring day in my junior year I decided to organize a hayride. I found a farmer in Wethersfield with a large wagon drawn by two horses, seven of us boys chipped in, and as many couples gathered at six P.M. at 68 Woodstock. I think it was Leon Cooperman who brought Hope, and Mike Kellin who brought Ruth. I can’t remember the other guys on the hayride that night. The only reason I remember Mike and Leon in this context is because I hungered to be with either of their dates. But I didn’t feel up to either Hope or Ruth. Locked in my gut, shared with no one until I shared it with Hope herself some forty years later, was the feeling that she was too fine for me. I didn’t feel like I deserved her.

  One day in the late seventies, when I had all those shows on the air, my secretary buzzed me. Hope Sheintop was on the line. She and her husband were in L.A., and the next day they were in my office. Hope looked as lovely as I thought she would. Her husband was a very nice guy, a doctor, as I recall, who seemed to have earned her. I told her in that safe moment how I felt about her in high school and especially on that night of the hayride. Hope smiled, looked tenderly to her husband and back at me. “Such a pity,” she said. She’d wanted to be with me, too, and wished all through our junior and senior years that I would call her. We shook our heads and laughed. I was wondering if she didn’t respond as she did to make me feel good. And then a moment later, as she and her husband were leaving, she turned and said, “You still shower before breakfast?” as she slipped out the door.

  Ruth Glazier was another knockout. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, but she seemed to belong with older guys, like Herbie Lerner, who was visiting me from New York the weekend after the hayride. “She’s perfect for Herbie,” I thought. “He’s only a year older, but a great athlete,” as if that had anything to do with it. Anyway, I called Ruth but she wasn’t home, and her folks didn’t know when they might hear from her, so I made another call to a number I had place-marked in the back of my mind. There’d been another great-looking girl on that hayride who seemed like fun—Charlotte Rosen from West Hartford. She answered the phone when I called, and at the sound of my voice she asked, excitedly, “Norman!?” It took my breath away, I was so flattered.

  “Listen,” I said, “my friend Herbie Lerner, a great guy, is in from New York and . . .”

  I didn’t get any further. “Call me when you want to date me,” she said and hung up. Wouldn’t you want to spend the rest of your life with a girl, a great-looking girl, who reacted to you that way? That’s the way I felt. And, not that many years later, I signed up to do just that. Charlotte Rosen was my first wife.

  But Ruth Glazier did call me back and was free on Sunday, so she became Herbie’s date. I made a few more calls, but when Sunday came it was just the three of us—Herbie, Ruthie, and me—who spent the afternoon in Elizabeth Park. Herb developed a quick crush on Ruth, and Ruth was a team player. They hit if off on that basis and, an hour into our afternoon, instead of the three of us it was two of them and one of me.

  It began to drizzle and then to rain. They loved the rain, laughed and ran in it, while I grew lonelier and lonelier. At one point I was walking ahead of them. The sounds they were making caused me to turn around. For an instant I saw them as in a wide shot. They were skipping along, holding hands and swinging them wildly, laughing, singing—and then my eyes and heart zoomed into a close-up of Ruth, her drenched jet-black hair matted against her face, cupping her cheeks, framing those drop-dead gorgeous eyes and the lush sliced melon of a smile below them. That face would have been unforgettable had I seen it on a dry afternoon, but in the rain, wet, memory wasn’t required. Like a billboard occupying a choice spot in Times Square, it has been there in my head ever since.

  I saw that face again up close in 1992, more than fifty years later. Ruth was a psychiatrist, had raised a family in Chicago, and was still in practice there. She’d read that People For the American Way, an organization I’d started eleven years earlier—more about that later—was holding a big dinner there, and that I was on the program. If that was so and I had a little time she’d love to see me, she wrote in a note to Art Kropp, then PFAW’s president. I was traveling alone, so I asked her to come along as my guest.

  As she stepped out of a cab at the hotel, I recognized Ruth easily, expecting her to show her age, of course. And yet, crazily enough, I was disappointed that she was no longer the girl on that billboard. Who knew what Ruth was thinking at the sight of me? Or what the doorman was thinking, for that matter, when he nodded good evening to just another elderly couple entering the hotel.

  I did learn what Ruth was thinking that day in the park with Herbie and me. She, too, wished she was with me, not my friend. She’d always hoped I would ask her out. Of course it made me feel good to hear that. But I couldn’t help wondering if she’d ask me if I still showered before breakfast.

  • • •

  I STARTED SEEING Charlotte in 1939, my seventeenth summer. She was a year older, had graduated from high school, and was working behind the cosmetics counter at G. Fox & Company, Hartford’s premium department store, as I was entering my senior year. We got married in 1943 and, strange as it may seem, we saw each other fewer than a dozen times between our meeting on the hayride and our wedding. There was little about our four-year acquaintance and twelve-year marriage that was not odd. The operative word that found us glomming on to each other had to have been need. In that first phone call Charlotte was clearly thrilled that I was calling her. I was excited in turn at her reaction, and for the moment we had answered each other’s need.

  Charlotte and I had nothing in common, really. I was attracted to the idea of a Charlotte long before I met her. I could not have thought of it in these terms then, but it’s as if I wanted to be the youngest man with a trophy wife. At sixteen, while we were still living in New York, I cut a picture out of a magazine of a girl in jodhpurs with a face I fancied. I put it in my wallet and flashed it now and again to show off my outdoorsy girlfriend. When I met Charlotte and learned she loved horses, I asked if she had a photo of herself in jodhpurs. She did and I switched the photos in my wallet. As for how Charlotte felt about me
, an aunt of my mother’s—we knew her as Tante Cookie—once put it this way: “Charlotte would be happiest on a deserted island, with Norman all to herself.” How sad for both of us.

  Our first date, unlike the rest of our time together, could not have been more eventful. I had a burning love of theater, and the Westport Playhouse, a much-celebrated summer theater in Westport, Connecticut, near the New York border, advertised a production of Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom starring Tyrone Power, a major motion picture star and matinee idol, and his French wife, Annabella, a movie star in her own right. I could not imagine a happier, more romantic occasion than this, even if it did include three hours of driving each way—maybe more, depending on the performance of the Model A 1932 four-cylinder Ford my friend Sidney Pasternack and I bought that spring for sixty-five dollars each. (I earned my half working on Saturdays for Uncle Al at the John Irving Shoe Store.)

  The morning of my big day my father made it bigger. “I’m coming home early for you,” he said. “You can drive my car to Westport.” My father was talking about his new 1939 Hudson Terraplane, which would make the drive shorter and absolutely dreamy. I was over the moon with excitement. The family car meant everything in those years; it was a matter of enormous pride, and for a teen to be allowed to take it on a date was extremely rare. He said he’d be home by three o’clock so that I would have time to pick up Charlotte in West Hartford and get to Westport around six, where we’d grab a bite at a diner and get to the theater by eight.

  At half past three Dad was still not home. My agonizing increased as the minutes continued to pass, and at ten minutes to four I jumped into the Model A and chugged out to West Hartford, tears running down my cheeks and cursing my father to hell and back. There was no highway or thruway from Hartford to New York then, and so the Little Model A Engine That Could strained and struggled through Berlin and Meriden, around Middletown and Waterbury, skirting New Haven to the county line, and then, finally, mercifully, onto the Merritt Parkway, the expressway to Westport (and beyond to New York City). Relieved and cooling off as we tooled along on a road that seemed made for this day and this event, Charlotte and I suddenly heard a horn. “Honk! Honk, honk!” In my rearview mirror, there was my father in his new Hudson Terraplane. Unable to reach me otherwise, he had chased me from 68 Woodstock to West Hartford, through half of Connecticut, to the Merritt Parkway, less than half an hour from Westport, so as to let me have his Terraplane and drive back to Hartford himself in my Model A. The grandstand play of my life.

  I might have seen Charlotte a time or two more that summer, but left to its own devices the relationship was destined to peter out. I had a full-time summer job driving a Good Humor truck, ringing those familiar bells through neighborhoods during the day and parked at night on the Boston Post Road, where local families out for an evening drive would stop by for their summer evening treat.

  • • •

  MY SENIOR YEAR at Weaver High was like a well-planned picnic. We seniors were the kings and queens of the roost; the school year was set to play out in a mounting series of highlighted events, culminating with class night, our senior prom, and the graduation itself. But the senior residing at 68 Woodstock Street was obsessed with one concern. What college could I get into, assuming my folks could afford to send me at all? My mother often moaned that it didn’t look likely, while my father just needed ten days to two weeks and everything would be looking different.

  I liked what I’d heard about Northwestern University, which was reputed to have a wonderful theater program. And, if reported correctly, it had a liberal Jewish quota system. That even such exalted institutions as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale limited the number of Jews they would accept each year was a fact of American life when our class was graduating. My friends with Jewish-sounding names must have felt like italicized beings as they filled out admission forms. Those with Gentile-sounding names, like mine, were spared the feeling until we came across the inevitable request to disclose our religious affiliation.

  The news that to be a Jew in America was to be “different” had come to me shockingly when I was nine years old, just before they sent my dad away. He had bought me a crystal radio kit. It consisted of a spool of thin wire, the crystal itself (like a small stone), and another little wire my dad called a cat’s whisker, with a tiny handle you maneuvered between your thumb and forefinger, lightly scratching the crystal until you picked up a radio signal, which you could then hear on the headset that came with the kit. We applied our crystal radio components to an empty oatmeal box, and to this day I can see my dad and me tickling that crystal with the cat’s whisker for many minutes until, suddenly, we caught a spine-tingling AM signal! And what was it? Amazingly, it was the unforgettable theme that introduced The Lone Ranger, H.K.’s favorite radio show.

  One night I was alone in bed poking around on my crystal set when I stumbled upon a man’s voice so overwrought that he could have been a member of our family. But this was not a voice ranting about someone who came late to Sophie’s wedding eight years ago, or a family member screeching that Burt should have known better than to recommend that butcher Dr. Pickman to Dorothy, who looks like a squirrel now—“You heard me, a squirrel. She looks like a squirrel now!” No, this voice, a strong high-pitched male voice, as I remember it, was carrying on about people who were calling him “an anti-Seemite” (as he pronounced it) when all he was doing was warning the 40 million working people who belonged to unions that some of their leaders were representatives of the devil. They were Communists, this voice went on, American-hating, anti-Christian Communists with Jew-sounding names—not that they necessarily were Jewish names, but they sure sounded like it—and that did not make him, Father Charles Coughlin, anybody’s anti-Seemite!

  Coughlin, often called the Father of Hate Radio, broadcast for an hour weekly from Detroit. He despised Franklin Roosevelt, fulminated endlessly about the New Deal as a betrayal of American values, and attached prominent Jews to everything he was railing against. Coughlin repulsed me thoroughly, but I listened to him enough and was so chilled by his polarizing and divisive rhetoric as to be reminded of him throughout my life whenever I’ve run into an irrational, self-serving mix of politics and religion. This was my introduction to the fact that there were people who disliked, mistrusted, even hated me because I was born a Jew. If I didn’t have a nose for the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism before, I had it from that moment on.

  • • •

  IN THE WINTER of my senior year at Weaver, as my parents wrestled with the question of what college they could afford to send me to, the American Legion announced the inauguration of its first National Oratorical Contest. The first competition would be between the three high schools in Hartford, followed by the county, state, and regional competitions. Each entrant was to prepare an eight-minute speech about the United States Constitution and then speak extemporaneously for three to four minutes on a related subject that would be slipped to them as they approached the podium for the second time. The first prize for winning the county competition was a scholarship to Emerson College in Boston.

  The title of my prepared speech was “The Constitution and Me.” Fueled by the idea of a quota for Jews seeking admission to certain colleges, my memory of Father Coughlin, and now the word out of Europe—where Hitler had marched into Austria, and Benito Mussolini, emulating Hitler, began enacting the first anti-Jewish legislation in Italy—I chose to speak to the specialness of being a member of a minority for whom the constitutional guarantees of equal rights and liberties just might have a more precious meaning. I won both the city and county contests and the scholarship to Emerson, but a “funny” thing happened on the way to that second competition.

  On the morning of the event that would take place that evening in the civic auditorium, I woke up with a case of the shivers and a bout of extreme nausea. No temperature. No aches or pains. Just the feeling of death warmed over. I was competing against three other h
igh school champions, I was scared, and I knew it. As I sought to “Straighten Up and Fly Right”—the title of a popular song of that era—it was clear to me that all I needed was comfort and support. My father was who-knew-where—I doubt that he was even aware of the event—so of course I turned to my mother. I see her now, coming into my room.

  “Darling, are you all right? You look terrible.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mother,” I muttered stoically. All I needed—ached for, actually—was a little maternal encouragement.

  Instead, I got, “There will always be another contest, darling. Stay home, you’re coming down with something.”

  It didn’t take long for my parents to forget that they’d ever worried about not being able to send me to college. Now they boasted of my acceptance to the class of ’44 by that prestigious Back Bay Boston institution Emerson College, right there on Beacon Street, along the Charles River. The source of the scholarship that made it possible somehow never came up.

  5

  THERE WAS A LOT going on in America during the summer of 1940, just before my freshman year at Emerson was to begin. Having struggled to deny the growing sense that war was inevitable, Congress was now close to establishing its first peacetime draft; Charlie Chaplin brilliantly satirized Adolf Hitler as The Great Dictator; President Franklin Roosevelt began his run for an unprecedented third term, against Indiana Republican Wendell Willkie; and in August my friend Sidney Pasternack and I decided we would spend the last weeks before college driving leisurely up through New England in our spiffy Model A. To make our expenses, we arranged to sell Roosevelt and Willkie pennants, buttons, and trinkets door-to-door.